Living Single, Friends, Girls, and Sex and the City are all quintessential New York shows, and as Michelle Buteau was developing the next generation of New York TV with Survival of the Thickest, she wanted to see the city she grew up in as a young woman. On the Good One podcast, Buteau explained how she was inspired to depict her version of New York onscreen. “I’m from Jersey, and I remember like sneaking out and driving my ’76 Camaro to New York with my Puerto Rican and Black friends and Haitian friends, and just like parking in a place I shouldn’t have been parked and going to the Limelight and seeing the queens and the club kids and the hoes and the hoes in training and the wannabe hip-hop heads, and that was when I was like 15, 16,” Buteau reminisced. “Then, when I finally got to live there when I was in my 20s, I was like ‘This is so cool, like a low-budget Sex and the City.’”

As for how Buteau wants to continue influencing the comedy scene, she hopes that comedians can operate from a place of punching up rather than picking on underrepresented groups, specifically recalling how she mentioned Dave Chappelle’s controversial jokes about the trans community in her comedy special. “He’s said some really egregious stuff about the trans community in four specials,” she said. “If people around the world are telling you this is hurtful, then maybe listen to them. We should all be held accountable.”

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 Her real-life version of the HBO show later inspired her own Netflix comedy series.